REVIEW: The Dream Hunter by Sherrilyn Kenyon

_______________________________________________________________Blurb

In the ethereal world of dreams, there are champions who fight to protect the dreamer and there are demons who prey on them…

Arik is such a predator. Condemned by the gods to live eternity without emotions, Arik can only feel when he’s in the dreams of others. For thousands of years, he’s drifted through the human unconscious, searching for sensation. Now he’s finally found a dreamer whose vivid mind can fill his emptiness.

Dr. Megeara Kafieri watched her father ruin himself and his reputation as he searched to prove Atlantis was real. Her deathbed promise to him to salvage his reputation has now brought her to Greece where she intends to prove once and for all that the fabled island is right where her father said it was. But frustration and bad luck dog her every step. Especially the day they find a stranger floating in the sea. His is a face she’s seen many times…. in her dreams.

What she doesn’t know is that Arik holds more than the ancient secrets that can help her find the mythical isle of Atlantis. He has made a pact with the god Hades: In exchange for two weeks as a mortal man, he must return to Olympus with a human soul. Megeara’s soul.

With a secret society out to ruin her expedition, and mysterious accidents that keep threatening her life, Megeara refuses to quit. She knows she’s getting closer to Atlantis and as she does, she stumbles onto the truth of what Arik really is.

For Arik his quest is no longer simple. No human can know of a Dream-Hunter’s existence. His dream of being mortal has quickly turned into his own nightmare and the only way to save himself will be to sacrifice the very thing he wanted to be human for. The only question is, will he?
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This was a strange world mankind lived in.
No wonder they escaped into dreams.

My Review
(Contains minor spoilers!!)

Well, I expected more…

Aside from the secondary characters who are really worth mentioning, for me The Dream-Hunter was a boring, weak, and unimpressive story.

First of all, I have serious problems with the main characters, Arik and Geary.

Geary is totally inconsistent. She is not even a character, she is just put together by various but ill-matched personalities and behaviorisms thrown in a pile. She behaves illogically in almost every way.

First, in her approach to Atlantis…The story starts that she hates her father because of his obsessed and vain quest for Atlantis, and considers him responsible for the death of the rest of their family. She had even changed her name in order to save her reputation and avoid all the inconveniences caused by the name of her infamous father. She not only despises her father, but she doesn’t believe in the existence of Atlantis at all.

After not meeting or speaking to each other for years, she travels to Greece to her dying father, and makes a promise to him to continue his search. She also receives artifacts from her father tagged with the date 9500 B.C., and she also identifies them – while she is standing on the shore of the Aegean Sea and her hair flies in the wind – simply looking at them as Atlantian items. Yeah, without radiocarbon dating or any equipment, just because they seem “very old”.

Followed by very out-of-character reasoning (something like,“OMG, this stuff is from Atlantis. OMG, my father was right, OMG, I feel so guilty not believing him…”), she spends six years searching for Atlantis – in vain. Towards the end of the story, she realizes that she jeopardizes her friends and family, and Arik also tells her that if she explores Atlantis, Apollymi will be free and the world is over. So she simply decides to stop searching. At least some inner conflict, please!

Second, in her behavior with Arik…Geary is very uptight, sober, and rational, even reserved and rigid in her life. But in her dreams she is wild and passionate. I can accept this contrast. She dreams about Arik for weeks (or maybe months?) before she fishes him out of the sea. As her dreams are vivid and detailed, she knows his name, knows every aspect of his face and body, even his voice. So she saves a drowning man who looks exactly like the man from her dreams, and even his name is the same. How does she react? An archaeologist who believes in Atlantis, and knows everything about mythology, mythical beings, and gods, even dream-gods!? She suspects that he is some kind of criminal, and accuses him with nonsensical things, and treats him like shit. Her style and repartees are not sarcastic, not amusing, just simply rude. She is arrogant and bitchy.

Oh, and the cliché I hate the most: the heroine’s hysteric reaction as a human to the existence of the supernatural. Well, Geary would get a prize for it.

But after Arik tells her (almost) everything, she falls for him almost immediately. Merely a couple of hours before she felt stalked by him, was in total discomfort, and suspicious about his motivations. And suddenly she is in love?

Arik is boring, lame, dull, oh, just… blah…He is obsessed with Geary but in a selfish way. He knows nothing about her, and he doesn’t even care. He just wants to meet her in the flesh and to have sex with her. Literally. Because he wants to experience it for real. He makes his careless and despicable bargain with Hades, but I despise it not only because of the fact that he offered Geary’s soul (he had no emotions at the time after all, so it quite explains it), but because at the age of twenty-seven thousand years or so, he should have at least some experience dealing with gods. He had been unemotional, not stupid! Not so believable.
His emotional awakening is not consistent. Sometimes he behaves like an alien, other times he is totally adapted.

Both Arik and Geary are too weak characters to do anything on their own. They highly depend on others’ help: Solin, Zebulon (aka ZT), a Dark-Hunter named Trieg, Kat, Apollymi (she was quite helpful), Hades and Persephone. Even in the last scene, when Geary is rescuing Arik, Kat is there to help. As soon as they get out of Hell, there is D’Alerian who shifts them back to their apartment.
There is only one time when Geary saves Arik from the Dolophoni changing the scene in their dreams. That was cool!One would expect much more from the main characters.

Actually, I liked the secondary characters better, especiallySolin, who was a much more complicated character than Arik. I appreciated his humor, the mystery around him, and ultimately his valor. Kat is a very interesting character as well. And I enjoyed Tory’s witty remarks, and the pourparler betweenHades and Persephone was hilarious, even a little exaggerated.